My 2018 was crazy. Here's my year in tweets

Dec 31, 2018

I can totally say 2018 was the best year of my life so far. Of course, that doesn’t count for much since I’m just 18, but using a parallel of how most of my friends are living (not to compare myself, but just as a pure exercise of gratitude), I’m doing pretty fine.

My year didn’t start good.

It started out in Petrolina, Brazil, drunk and in a family party I didn’t want to be in.

Looking from the outside, it would look like I didn’t have much to complain about.

I had a pretty stable job and was slowly decorating my place in Recife.

However, I was miserable. Nothing was happening in my life. Everyday looked exactly the same. Same places, same people, same conversations, same everything.

My hobby? Crypto trading (as everyone at the time, I believe.)

Crypto trading has teached me more about human psychology (including my own) than about finances

I lost almost everything that I “invested” in crypto this year. But I kept doing it, because I needed some sort of risk in my life.

At that point I had zero risk going on. I had a fixed salary, fixed rent, fixed groceries, fixed routine. Everything was in its place. And as someone who had quit high school a year before to do startups, I was getting crazy this way.

But that was about to change. Radically.

It was in January that I met a guy on Twitter named Joshua Voydik. Joshua led me to another guy on Twitter named Pieter Levels. Pieter led me to a Telegram community named WIP. And WIP led me to a french maker named Leo Baecker.

From this point on, this ignited the biggest mindset change I ever had about money, traveling, startups and friends.

But it started small.

I became Leo’s HyperPing first customer (crazy to think that this probably ignited a series of events in his life too), and he convinced me to pay for a WIP membership.

I need to get used to do more things remotely. Many things I think I can only solve in presence when in fact they can be solved remotely from any part of the planet

Before 2018, my entire reality was the reality of most tech workers in Brazil: bullshit paychecks, bullshit startups, long commutes, bosses who clearly needed psychiatric help, and an overall stressful life.

And then I met these guys, from a total different dimension, who made money from their own stuff, full-time or part-time, some of them were at home, some of them were traveling the world. WIP changed my life.

From that point, all I wanted to do was to escape 9-5 and build my own products. I had a purpose now besides working five days a week to get drunk on the weekends.

While still in Petrolina, and with only a 3G connection, I started shipping my first side-project after WIP: ScreenMug.

That launch was especially important to me, because in December 2017 I had put a small side-project out there, a simple crypto-portfolio tracker, and the only feedback I got from the outside world was this:

ScreenMug was also important because it launched just a few days after I had a incredible 10-hour panic attack because of my 9-5. I really thought I was going to die that day. I couldn’t stand up, I couldn’t control my breath. For ten hours. One full night without any sleep, just panic.

That was my final wake up call: leave your job, leave Recife, this path is not what you want.

To escape reality while I didn’t have the courage to leave my job, I started spending most of my days with virtual people.

I'm spending A LOT of time lurking on Twitter and Telegram these last few days 👀

I would talk everyday with my friend & coworker Everton about how what I really wanted was to leave my crappy PHP job and do my own thing. And everytime he told me to “just do it, because you’re young”.

And he was right. There was nothing stopping me besides the idea that I had something to lose. I had nothing to lose.

The corporate world creates a kind of fear in you that makes you emotionally dependent on companies. They make you think that you have something to lose: money, reputation, status.

The truth is that I could do pretty fine on my own, but my confidence was so low after 2017 that I didn’t really see that.

Before March I took a quick trip to my hometown to see some friends. They had just rented an apartment in a upscale building in the city, and were planning to turn it into a “code house”.

So an idea popped up in my mind: I don’t really know what I want to do with my life (besides the fact that I wanna be location-independent), but I do know what I DON’T want (which is to stay in my job), so I might just move in with those guys and see what happens.

And that’s what I did.

On March 1 I gave a 30-day notice to my boss.

All existential questions always come down to "WHAT THE FUCK AM I GOING TO DO WITH MY LIFE?"

By the end of March, there I was. Excited with something for the first time in months.

Still, I had the same level of fear as before. It was no coincidence that I was moving back to my hometown. Yes, it was scary to leave a life I’ve been building for almost a year, so I needed a safety net, and being in my hometown, near people I knew, and near my parents, gave me the security I needed.

Today is probably my last night in Recife 🇧🇷 Feeling pretty uncertain about the future, which is probably a good thing haha

So I decided to go to a tech conference in Salvador, with a few friends. A fairly short trip to renew my energies.

At this point my entire life could fit inside two backpacks, and I could work from anywhere. Still, I had a strange impostor syndrome that didn’t really let me call myself “a nomad”, because I didn’t even have a passport yet or because I wasn’t in Bali like all the cool kids.

Salvador got the job done. This 4-day trip was enough to give me a taste that there was LOTS of places to see in the world. I felt totally renewed, and I definitely didn’t want to stay home.

But I still had plenty of problems to take care before really hitting the road.

I wasn’t making enough money to sustain a full-time travel lifestyle (or so I thought, one of the things I realized by traveling more is that traveling can be as cheap or as expensive as you want)

I didn’t have a passport, so I was limited to traveling in Brazil. And traveling in Brazil has two problems: flights are crazy expensive and internet access mostly sucks.

It didn’t matter. I just couldn’t stay in my hometown (see how most of the time I was just running away from some demon of my own creation? That’s how anxiety and comparing yourself to others feels like.)

So I bought the cheapest one-way ticket I could find, $60 to fly to… Petrolina! The city where my year started. And also the city where my sister lives, which meant I could couchsurf again and avoid spending my runaway.

I spent two months there, from June to the end of July. I was slowly building confidence to travel to other places.

tl;dr: money is still an issue. marketing is hard. I don't feel confident enough to go international yet.

WIP was especially important here. The feedback loops there, and the feeling of always having friends on my pocket everywhere I go was awesome. We even watched the World Cup together using Telegram.

Around that time I started asking other freelancers in WIP about how I could improve my lead generation, get more contracts and how to better price my hourly rate.

And then another mind-blow realization happened: I have been heavily underpaid my entire life!

No, really. Do you know how much I made in that job in Recife that I hated? R$2.000, or about $500, a month, to work 8 hours per day. That was about $3 PER HOUR!!!!

Was I underpaid? Depends on the referential. For my Telegram friends, I was a slave. For my Recife friends, I was a yuppie.

I worked in an office with about 15 other people day to day, and 99% of them made the same amount, sometimes less. So from my referential, considering I was 17 and they were 25~35, I was rich af. Lots of my coworkers had masters and one of them was even accepted into a PhD program. Still, they were making $500 a month.

My referential was the problem.

And when I say that WIP changed my life, I’m not lying. This realization that with the same skillset I had I could make about 40x more just by working to overseas clients changed everything.

I calculated my costs and decided that I would no longer work for less than $25 per hour. This basically meant I had to totally replace my freelance clients, and simply give up the idea of working to any local company.

This basically annihilated any belief that money was a problem to travel the world. The problem was that I was building my castle in the wrong place. This simple idea of arbitrage changed everything.

So I got a passport in Petrolina, and took the leap: bought a one-way ticket to Madrid to travel together with Everton and Allan (both former coworkers who also decided to go nomad), on Dec 4. Why the huge space between booking the ticket and actually flying out? I still had to build income and get clients paying me in a stronger currency.

By the end of July I decided to fly back to my hometown with a clear goal in my mind: use these four months before my trip to totally internationalize my income.

I got this done by September, when I landed a flexible position as a contractor in a remote-first software studio, paying 10x more than my position in Recife.

On the first week I knew we were a match. The team is full of makers, entrepreneurs, and digital nomads. We really attract what we emanate.

On October I turned 18. That didn’t really change anything for me, since I was already legally emancipated since age 16. Still, it was a reminder that lifes goes faster than you expect.

The cost of internationalizing my freelance biz was that I was no longer working on my own projects. And I was kinda freaking out a bit. My ideal lifestyle is a balance between doing my own stuff and freelancing.

It was frustrating, I didn’t actually ship anything. Momentum for my side-projects was totally gone.

So I decided to try the co-founder thing once again, and by November I joined Expire as a co-founder, with two other nomad friends.

The startup was actually founded six months before I joined it, but Heitor and Maria are biz & marketing people, so after six months they had an audience built for the product, but no real product shipped.

And that’s why I accepted working with them. Because we complement each other. Being a solo founder works depending on how mature you are, and I’ve come to the realization that my biz/mkt personality still needs a lot of work. And is there any better way to learn something than by closely watching people you admire doing it?

We’re on the verge of launching a product in the Brazilian market, I hope to talk more about Expire here on the weeks to come.

By December I was getting into the longest flight of my life (so far). GRU-MAD.